Ziggy587 wrote:The Simpsons arcade beat 'em up kind of baffles me. Developed by Konami, it's another four player licensed beat 'em up made during the heyday of a prolific game developer. But while Turtles in Time had a quality port on the SNES, The Simpsons had rather crappy ports to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. I always wondered why this game wasn't ported to the SNES. Was it a license issue? That doesn't seem right since there were plenty of other Simpson games on consoles. Does it not actually play as good as it looks? Because it looks fantastic. It was available for a short while (less than two years) digitally on Xbox 360 and PS3. And Arcade 1up has produced a four player machine, although it is expensive. I've always wondered why this one fell into licensing hell.
I always figured it had something to do with Konami making the arcade game but Acclaim publishing the console games. Like, Fox sold the arcade rights to Konami and the console rights to Acclaim, so unless Konami wanted to license the arcade game to Acclaim and share in the profits, there wasn't anything they could do.
Like a bunch of folks have said, I think its the visceral feeling you get from playing them that makes beat-'em-ups so satisfying. The elaborate sprite work, the pounding music, and the impact of the violence make them gaming "experiences" more so than a lot of other genres. I think that's another reason why they flourished in arcades more so than home consoles. But it's been really great to see them have something of a renaissance on consoles, really starting with Castle Crashers and the indie scene.
My favorite of the unsung beat-'em-ups is definitely Night Slashers, a game a few other folks have already mentioned. Gory horror combined with the visceral nature of the beat-'em-up is a really smart match. It obviously worked really well with Splatterhouse, another classic brawler. The two Splatterhouse games on the Genesis tend to get a little less attention than the original arcade/TurboGrafx game, but I think they're both actually better than the original, at least from a gameplay perspective.
When we were growing up, my brother and I really enjoyed the SNES port of Knights of the Round. It's a brawler following the story of King Arthur, although it plays pretty fast and loose with the plot. To be fair, the original Arthurian romances play pretty fast and loose with the plot too. It's funny that Final Fight on the SNES was such a stinker, because all of the other Capcom SNES arcade ports (Captain Commando, Knights of the Round, King of Dragons, Magic Sword, etc.) are all fantastically faithful and really great ways to experience those games outside of the arcade setting.
Another beat-'em-up that I think has been neglected a bit due to it never receiving a home port is the arcade game Metamorphic Force. It very much feels like a sequel to Konami's X-Men arcade game, to the point that I wonder if it was originally planned to be one, but wound up getting sprite-swapped at some point in development because of a rights issue. Or, if somewhere in the storage room of the studio that produced that X-Men animated pilot is the pilot for a Metamorphic Force cartoon that never saw the light of day. It's a game where you play one of four dudes who can transform into some kind of animal-man if you find the right power-up. If you liked the gameplay of X-Men, you'll definitely like Metamorphic Force.
